By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
The traditional doctrine that God can create and consummate any logically possible state of affairs is sound insofar as it rightly implies that logical and real possibility ultimately coincide, or, perhaps better, are coextensive.
But if alternative possibilities are indeed real, there must be a temporal aspect to the very being of God. What God can create and consummate, as distinct from what God eternally and necessarily is, is unavoidably temporal, belonging, as it does, to God's future, as distinct from what has always belonged to God's past (cf. CSPM: 133). Furthermore, God's power to create and consummate any logically possible world must be defined, "not as his [sic] freedom to choose that world, but as his [sic] freedom to choose the basic laws of such a world and his [sic] capacity adequately to know and thus in the most absolute sense possess whatever world results from the laws plus the choices of the creatures so far as left open by the divine choice. Knowing is one thing, choosing is another thing, and it will not do to try to obliterate the distinction, even in God. God can know the world, whatever it may be; but no world could be determined merely by divine choice, since the very meaning of 'world' is a set of individuals to some extent determining what divine choice has left indeterminate though determinable. To be possible is to be possible content of divine knowledge, but not necessarily to be possible object of divine choice. God cannot choose a single creature in its concreteness, for the simple reason that it would not then be a creaturely act" (CSPM: 137 f.).
18 September 1991
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